It’s lunchtime in downtown Montreal and employees at Chinese fast-food outlet Tiki Ming are luring customers with the enthusiasm of carnival game workers.

“Hello, sir. Special No. 2?” a cheery woman asks a patron walking by, referring to the restaurants’s offer of General Tao chicken with rice, an eggroll and a fountain drink for $8.25. If clients were window-shopping for a meal before, they’re quickly being ushered to the cash register.

“Sometimes it works” being so aggressive, the worker admits later. It’s certainly worked for her boss — Quebec food king Stanley Ma.

The soft-spoken founder and chief executive of MTY Food Group Inc. has built a quick-service empire by gobbling up targets at below-asking prices. He started with one Tiki Ming restaurant in 1983. Now he’s got 2,263 stores under 27 banners across Canada and the Middle East, including such popular brands as Taco Time, Thai Express, Yogen Fruz, Jugo Juice and Mr. Submarine.

MTY is coming off a year of record sales and earnings. System-wide sales from franchisees and corporate stores rose by 14% to reach $527.6-million for the 12 months ended Nov. 30, 2011, generating $78.5million in revenues for MTY. Profit rose 5% to a historical high of $16.2-million, or 84¢ per share.

He’s lost some investors, who argue it may be difficult for MTY to move the earnings needle as much as it has in the past as good acquisitions become harder to find. It’s all the more urgent when you consider same-store sales growth, which rose less than 1% last year.

But Mr. Ma, a Hong-Kong émigré who doesn’t like to cook, is cautiously upbeat. He says there are more acquisitions to come in 2012. He says the benefits of buying Mr. Sub, Jugo Juice and Koryo Korean BBQ have yet to fully work their way into the bottom line. And he says the company will continue to generate consistent returns for shareholders in what remains a “fragile” economy.

“The marketplace knows I’m looking [for buying opportunities] all the time,” Mr. Ma said in an interview Feb. 17. “I expect something [will] happen in 2012… Is it going to be as big as Mr. Sub? We have to look at what’s out there and take an intelligent decision.”

As he continues hunting for brands to add to his stable, the CEO has to manage a business that is increasingly under pressure – from competition, changing consumer tastes and rising ingredient costs. He’s trying to clean up Country Style by changing the branding and signage. And he’s trying to breathe new life into Mr. Sub by tweaking the menu and keeping franchisees motivated.

“MTY, some of their brands are pretty good,” said franchise consultant Gareth Parry. “But they’re running out of space. They’re running out of [organic] growth opportunities because there’s so many other brands coming into the marketplace.”

Mr. Ma says the thing most likely to keep him up at night is worry over another food safety scare. When Maple Leaf Foods Inc. experienced an outbreak of listeria at one of its meat plants in 2008, Mr. Sub, one of Maple’s buyers, saw its own sales suffer.

“Food poisoning is something I’m very scared of,” he said, adding MTY retrains its people every six months on proper food-handling procedures.

Investors would be wrong to dismiss MTY. The company pays a dividend, hiking it 20% last month. It has vertical integration plans – a manufacturing plant MTY owns currently sells to third parties, but Mr. Ma eventually wants to use it to supply his restaurants to better control prices. And management recently convinced a landlord at the corner of Yonge and King streets in downtown Toronto to give MTY an entire food court for itself, suggesting similar deals may be in the offing.

“The jury is definitely still out but the fact that Stanley was able to talk a food court [owner] into doing that for him, yeah I think that’s a positive sign,” said Jeff Mo, associate portfolio manager at Mawer Investment Management in Calgary, which owns MTY shares.